Fonts and Font Highlighting in CP4

[Marla_Landreth]

Hi All,

I've just started with CP4, and I have a question about text and highlighting. Following are three image snags, all taken within the CP4 UI. They're 11 pt font magnified at 300%.

Why is it that text in light colors looks sharp and clear like this when you're entering it:

But when you've finished entering text and click elsewhere, deactivating the text entry box, it looks like the image below?

If I publish with it like this, it looks the same, noisy, or  grey-blurry in both FF and IE.

I've found that changing the highlight to white gets rid of the gray noise:

But I'm curious as to

• why the default seems to be grey highlighting on text, if indeed that's what's causing the noise in the second image above, and
• why the display quality seems to diminish when the text box is deactivated
• whether anyone has found a way to make font look the first pic above when published.

Thanks in advance for any information about this!

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

I believe what you are seeing is anti-aliasing on a Transparent Text Caption type.

Try this. Edit the caption. Position the cursor at the end of all the text. Press enter twice to create two blank lines. Configure the last line to be bulleted. now size the caption so you don't see the bulleted line. The anti-aliasing should be gone now.

You can also turn off anti-aliasing by clicking Edit > Preferences > Project > SWF Size and Quality.

Cheers... Rick

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[Marla_Landreth]

Hi Captivator,

thanks for your reply. My current .cp file is fixed, so I tried to regenerate the problem.

I started a new project using a template from the Soft Hard Skill folder, Conservative. On the first slide, I changed Template Overview to orange (FF9900), then clicked a non-text area of the slide. The text went orange with grey noise. For me, turning anti-alias off didn't cause a change, nor did turning it back on.

Maybe it's my computer, but the only way I can get rid of the grey noise like that in the second image is select the text, change the highlight to C0C0C0 then change it to FFFFFF. I think I learned highlight trick ~2004 from CatBandit, you or Paul from RaisingAimee. I'm still not sure what causes it, and I'm curious to hear if others have seen this or if you have any other ideas.

Thanks again Captiv8r.

Marla

[Captiv8r · Accepted solution]

Hello again

The option in preferences is intended to change the issue on a global scale project wide.

Indeed fellow Adobe Community Professional Paul Dewhurst was the first to discover how to prevent anti-aliasing from occurring by using the c0c0c0 background color trick. Later we discovered that the presence of a bulleted line anywhere in the caption would work as well. This seemed simpler to achieve than using the c0c0c0 trick, which is why I normally suggest using it.

Another thing that can cause the anti-aliasing to occur regardless of the tricks listed above is if you have "Font smoothing" turned on in Windows. Font Smoothing will also cause anti-aliasing to occur and it looks odd. Here is a screen capture of it. I always present this during the normal course of a Captivate class.

Cheers... Rick

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[Marla_Landreth]

I tried got out the Conservative template and changed Template Overview to orange. There is already bulleted text in that caption but I tried adding another bullet at the end. No luck. I made a new caption, made the text orange/ugly and tried adding a bullet there, again no luck. Turning on C0C0C0 highlighting then changing it to white seems to be necessary.

Text Smoothing: I have Win7 and the smoothing choices are more limited, though it seems that might change with SP1. I'm not sure if the current smoothing limitations of Win7 are making it require the C0C0C0 highlighting shuffle.

Should others encounter this font weirdness, I'm thinking they can fix it using the solutions outlined above, thus I'm marking Captiv8r's second message as the answer.

[Captiv8r]

Hi again

I followed the steps you outlined as well as I could. I opened the same template. You weren't clear on how you opened the template. Did you open it for editing? (CPTL file) Or did you create a project based on the template? (CP file)

I can't really imagine that there would be a difference either way, but thought I'd ask. I created a project based on the template. When I looked at the first slide as you said you did, it was hidden. So I'm guessing you elected to "unhide" it? I'm further assuming you meant that you selected all the text in the single and very large caption, then changed the font color to #FF9900. I did that as well.

I noted that the text already contains some bulleted lines. So it does not surprise me in the least that you saw no difference when you added a bullet to the bottom line. My point with that is that sometimes you have a caption that has no bullets anywhere in sight. And by adding the bullet and sizing the caption so you don't see it, you are causing the anti-aliasing not to be employed. It's the mere presence of a single bulleted line occurring anywhere in the caption that causes the change.

I can only conclude that what you are seeing is the Font Smoothing I described and that Windows 7 implements it in a slightly different manner, so the steps I outlined about how to turn it off or on aren't working for a Windows 7 machine. I use Windows XP and sometimes Vista (I have a dual boot PC) so the next time I boot into Vista I'll have to see where the option is and how it's different.

The net result is that here on my XP box, using the same template with the same settings you describe (sans c0c0c0 shading) I'm not seeing what you are. I'll insert a partial screen capture below.

Cheers... Rick

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